A key driver in the origin of Resilience Engineering RE was the need to help organizations outmaneuver complexities that arose in parallel with growth. Organizational struggles with complexity… | David Woods

A key driver in the origin of Resilience Engineering RE was the need to help organizations outmaneuver complexities that arose in parallel with growth. Organizational struggles with complexity undermined all aspects of system performance & threatened an organization's viability in terms of both large economic harm and safety harm (injuries and deaths). The runaway automation event that bankrupted the Knight Capital in 2010 was characterized by the same dynamics that occurred in events that led to substantial fatalities (eg Boeing crashes in 2018/2019). RE put doing things safely & effectively together to mitigate the risk of these kinds of viability crushing events (eg chapters in the 1st book). The starting point was the evidence that systems were more exposed to break down than stakeholders recognized, but major failures occurred less often only due to people who provided the extra adaptive capacity to make things go right. Doing things safely & effectively depended on supporting and not hindering this adaptive capacity. RE continues to learn from the ongoing stream of challenge cases usually well handled or nearly so. The knowledge, findings, technqiues that followed are even more important today as multiple destabilizing forces now combine to disrupt all systems at all scales up to societal. But need, capability, & adoption are different. Yes, adoption has been slow/spotty. The understanding of how adaptive systems function/malfunction has grown dramatically in conjunction with using this knowledge positively in many projects & sectors. Need is clearer & greater than ever. Now we must expand RE advances to function at/across community, regional, societal & even global scales. This is a tall order. Yet in times where the only certainty is high uncertainty ahead, investing in adaptive capacity is the best strategy available. Carney's Davos talk is a guide to adaptation & re-vitalization given the shock of "rupture" in geopolitical/economic sphere, and parallels what RE has learned about adaptation & re-vitalization for shocks in the safety/technology sphere. The irony is-all of us need to use what we have learned about adaptive capacity ourselves in our roles, including those of us who have tried to advance doing things safely and effectively. Carney highlights re-vitalization & reframing, despite the tensions, and cautions that retreat to the past or cautious incremental steps will be unable or insufficient to rise to the challenges of today.